For almost a year after that I watched her. Not the way it sounds. I just — noticed. I noticed that she sat with her back to the wall in meetings, if she could. I noticed that she went outside to the bench by the bike rack when it rained, alone, and sat under the overhang with her coffee, and that once I saw her there with her eyes closed and her hands pressed flat against the bench on either side of her as if she were holding herself to the earth. I knew, by then, that I was going to say nothing. I'd known it since the elevator. She was alive, and she was in love, and she had a man who looked at her the way Derek looked at her across the fifth floor — with a kind of starved, astonished gratitude, as if he could not believe his luck — and I told myself that what I had done on that bank was finished, and that the truth was a thing I'd be handing her only to make myself feel better. That nobody needed it. That I was protecting her. My mother would have been proud.
Then, in the first week of September, I went into the third-floor break room at ten-thirty to fill my water bottle and heard her through the open door of the little room beyond it, the one with the lactation chair and the locking door that people use for crying and personal phone calls. She was in there with a friend from implementation, a red-haired woman named Bethany, and the door was ajar, and I don't think either of them knew anyone was outside.
"— and she says it's really common," Talia was saying. "That the brain just, like, fills in. When you're oxygen-deprived, especially. It makes stuff up to cover the gaps, and then you remember the made-up stuff as if it's real."
"But you're so sure about it," Bethany said.
"That's the thing. I'm so sure. It's the clearest thing I remember from the whole morning. I remember the water and the headlights under the water, and then I remember a face. A woman. Older. Like, my mom's age. With her hair all wet and plastered down, kind of light brown, and she's right over me and she's saying, 'Look at me, I've got your head, I've got you, sweetheart.' Over and over. Sweetheart. Like a mom says it." She laughed in a way that wasn't a laugh. "I dream about it. Like twice a week. It's the only part of the dream that isn't horrible."
"And Derek says —"
"Derek says it must've been the paramedic. But I looked it up, Beth. I called the fire department. They were both guys. Both paramedics, both guys, I talked to one of them, he was so nice about it. There wasn't a woman. There wasn't anybody but Derek." A pause. "And my therapist's like, that's okay, the voice is a comfort your mind built for you, you don't have to know where it came from. And I'm sitting there going — but if I can't trust what I remember about the worst thing that ever happened to me, then what can I trust? Like, what else did I make up? Did I make up the headlights? Am I making up — I don't know. Anything. It's like the floor's not there."
"Have you read the police report? Wouldn't it say?"